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WASHINGTON—If you’re not religious, you might want to get down on your knees in any case. We’ve just had some sort of sign in Denver.

Playing in a game he should not have won, Broncos quarterback and spandex missionary Tim Tebow managed one of the great finishes in football — and perhaps sports — history on Sunday evening.

After somehow battling Pittsburgh to a 23-23 regulation standstill, Denver began overtime at their own 20-yard line.

Nearly two years ago, the NFL’s playoff overtime rules were changed. This was the first chance to try them out. Under those regulations, sudden death is eliminated. Once a team scores, their opponent also gets a possession.

One exception — if a touchdown is scored on the coin-toss winner’s opening drive, the game ends.

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You see the light now, right?

On the first play in overtime, Tebow connected on a simple post pattern with Demaryius Thomas. Inexplicably and, more importantly, inexcusably, the Steelers had snuck the entire defence up to the line. There was no safety to intercept Thomas. He floated across the field, took hold of one of the rare tight spirals Tebow threw all game, stiff-armed one pursuer and sprinted 60 or so yards to the end zone.

Given Denver’s recent form (three humiliating and offence-free losses to end the season) and Pittsburgh’s quality (the No. 1 defence in the NFL), this may qualify as the most unlikely playoff win in league history.

Maybe this is where you drop in the ’93 Bills and their 32-point comeback on the Oilers. That would be where I point out that that Bills team was, you know, good.

Denver isn’t. Or wasn’t. Aw, you can’t be sure what the hell they are anymore. They are starting to feel fated, if that makes any sense.

Pittsburgh will feel the same way after coming so close. Tebow staked the Broncos to a second-quarter lead after completing five huge plays — the only five passes he completed in the quarter — that resulted in 20 points.

He went only 10-for-21 passing in the game. The rub? Each completed pass averaged a staggering 32 yards. Pittsburgh arrived convinced they couldn’t be beaten through the air. Broncos coach John Fox brilliantly turned Pittsburgh’s greatest strength into a hubristic weakness.

Nonetheless, there was the deflating air of inevitability as the Steelers pulled the Broncos back in in the second half. Pittsburgh had the opportunity to try a 66-yard field goal on the last play of regulation to win the game.

It would have been a record distance, but it might have been possible given the strong leg of the Steelers’ kicker, Wallaceburg, Ont., native Shaun Suisham, and Denver’s thin air. Instead, Pittsburgh took a long shot down the field and disastrously decided to trust their defence.

Shortly before the start of the epochal Denver-Pittsburgh game, the wild-card round of this NFL post-season was shaping up nicely, with a few fun storylines going forward.

Houston won in its first-ever playoff appearance, and will travel to Baltimore on Saturday.

New Orleans was historically good on offence in outgunning Detroit and heads to surprising San Francisco as every contrarian’s pick to upset their way into the championship game.

The ’11 Giants looked ominously like the ’07 Giants, who rode a wild-card berth to a championship. They grew a defence overnight and smothered the formidable running game of the Atlanta Falcons in the Sunday appetizer, winning 24-2. The Giants will travel to Green Bay on Sunday to face a Packers team that will spend days wondering if they were right to put their collective feet up before Christmas and cruise to the end. That’s another charismatic upset special in the making.

But it won’t matter this week.

Tebow’s overtime toss moved all those storylines to the footnotes.

We are about to be buried under a Tebow-related publicity avalanche. He was already big. By Saturday night, when he takes the field in Foxborough, Mass., to face the New England Patriots, he will be a media Colossus of Rhodes.

It may not last, but for the next six days, Tebow — an ebullient born-again pin-up who seems immune to doubt and scorn — is the most celebrated athlete in North America. This may even give him some global credibility.

If so, he’s a new sort of sports star — one who isn’t that great at sports.

Of course, Tebow was pretty great on Sunday. But his passes are errant more often than they’re on target. He throws the same sort of spiral you do — sporadic. Whatever surplus of heart he has may be related to a deficiency of on-field cerebrality.

Curiously, that is the core of his appeal.

You don’t need think too hard about it now. They’ll be taking it apart nightly until Saturday at 8 p.m. The story is not likely to last much longer than that. No more unlikely than Sunday’s win.

In any case, you’re on notice that Tim Tebow may be writing a new kind of fairy tale — one that you predicted beforehand.

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